Category Archives: Computer Music – Hardware

For a limited time, if you buy an Apogee Ensemble or Element series Thunderbolt audio interface you will receive a discount code for a free six month subscription to the Eventide Ensemble Bundle!

Apogee interfaces are renowned in the industry for super clean conversion and the sound of Eventide’s hardware can be found littered all over numerous releases from the past 40 odd years so this is a match made in heaven for audio purists.

If you’ve ever wanted to try out the H910 harmonizer, Blackhole reverb, H3000 or any of the other iconic effects then now is your chance!

Zoom have announced the release of their new LiveTrack L-20 mixer, promising many new extra features, building on their concept first introduced with the L-12.

Take a first look at the key new features of the LiveTrak L-20.

Create Six Custom Monitor Mixes

With six independent Monitor Outputs, each musician can have its own custom mix, now complete with effects and easily switchable from headphone output to balanced line output for stage monitors. In addition, L-20 provides a dedicated headphone output for FOH (front-of-house) to enable monitoring of each custom mix and master out from the console.

Two Effects Sends

L-20 offers two Effects section for total of 20 built-in EFX with adjustable parameters. For maximum flexibility, now you can easily assign one Effect section to the Monitor mixes while the other section is assigned to the Master output.

Wireless Mixing

To enhance its effective operation from a distance, L-20 offers wireless control* via its own app for iPad featuring Fader Levels and Modes, Scenes, EQ parameters and more. Now you can even manage your EFX and Scene Library right from your iPad. *Optional Zoom Bluetooth LE Adapter (BTA-1)is required.

It’s been a while now since we sat down and took a good look at any of the mobile processor releases. It’s a market segment that has been crawling along slowly in recent years with minor incremental upgrades and having checked out the last couple of mobile flagship chips, it was obvious that with each generation we were seeing those refinements focused more on improved power handling rather than trying to extract every drop of performance.

Admittedly in the shape of last years 7700HQ they perhaps got closer to the equivalent desktop model than any generation previously managed to achieve in previous years. Whilst welcome, this was really more a symptom of stagnating desktop speeds, rather than any miraculous explosion in mobile power. Whilst the chip itself was a great performer, the fact that it got there by eaking a few percent generation, upon generation… well, by the time we got there, it was all ultimately a little underwhelming.

But now, thanks to AMD’s continued push in the current desktop CPU war, we’ve seen Coffee Lake emerge from the blue camp and now we’re going to get hands-on with the mobile equivalent.

The i7 8750H we have here today is a 6 core with hyperthreading, running with a base clock of 2.20GHz and a max single core turbo frequency of 4.10GHz and leads the way when it comes to mobile i7’s.

Just as a side note before we kick this off, there is another chip above this, in the form of the i9 8950HK which is also 6 cores + hyperthreading but with another 500MHz on the clock. I mention this as Apple has just announced it’s going into the flagship Macbook later in the year, we do have them due to land with us in PC laptops as well in a month or two, so I will be benchmarking that when it arrives with us too.

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Clocking Off

Already in the very first screenshot above, we’ve inadvertently tipped a nod to what’s going to be the crux of this write-up. The clock speeds are somewhat wide-ranging, to say the least. On paper, there is almost 2GHz worth of clock between the base and turbo clocks. Keeping in mind that it’s single core turbo only up to the 4.1GHz and suddenly you find yourself asking about what the rest of the cores will be doing at that point.

Quickly throwing CPUid on and running it returns us a result of 3890GHz, which if it had been all cores would have been rather impressive for a mobile chip. In this instance, however, I wasn’t doing anything other than sitting on the desktop when this snapshot was taken. The score you see is the highest core score and it’s hyper-thread was showing as matching it.

The rest of the cores, however, well, they were largely unused and sat around the baseline 2.0GHz – 2.6GHz level. What we really want to know of course is what sort of average speed we can expect from all the cores being kicked up to 100% load.

Any longer term followers of these pieces will already be well aware that my preference for testing involves doing an all core overclock or in more basic terms, I tend to favour locking all the cores to the single core max turbo speed.

Yes, it’s an overclock, but it’s one that the chips are kind of rated to. Admittedly, it’s not rated to quite the level we’re working at here, but hey… that’s why we favour some chunky aftermarket cooling in those systems to make everything alright.

Except, when dealing with laptops we can’t go strapping a large chunk of copper to it, in fact, a lot of the tweaks we would wish to make on a desktop system, simply don’t exist in laptop land. Often with laptops, it’s a case of a unit either working out of the box or with a few basic tweaks or otherwise due to drivers or hardware choices it’ll never really be suitable for the sort of real-time processing required for working with audio.

I grabbed a copy of AIDA64 and gave it a quick run, at least enough to force the CPU to load up all the cores and simulate a heavy workload and how those cores would respond to such a load.

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What we see here is all the cores being pushed, with the highest speed core running about 3000MHz in the screenshot. Monitoring it in real-time it was bouncing around 3000 – 3200MHz range. Similarly, at the lower end, we see a core sat around 2600MHz and this would bounce up to around 2800MHz at times.

So, where’s our 4.1GHz turbo? Well, that single core turbo only really achieves such lofty heights if the rest of the cores are sat around doing nothing. In the interest of load balancing and heat management should more than a couple of cores need to be turbo’d then all of them will shift to a safer average.

You see on desktops with chips that have a range of a 3.8Ghz to 4.3Ghz sitting mostly around the 4GHz level and is why I tend to notch them all up to 4.3GHz in that sort of situation. It ensures no sudden ramping up and down and ensures we get some nice stable but optimized performance out of a setup without taking any major risks.

With these laptops, we don’t get those sort of options, nor I suspect would heat permit us to be quite so aggressive with the settings. Whilst the headline here of 6 cores is fairly unprecedented within a consumer level laptop, and certainly, on a fairly mainstream chipset, it’s a little bit smoke and mirrors with how it’s presented if you don’t fully understand how the turbo presents itself.

The potential issues it presents to us are in the form of the ASIO buffer. With whole channels being assigned to each given thread, we ideally want the performance level across all cores to be as equal as possible. For audio systems the overall performance can often be limited by how powerful the weakest core is, this is something we need to keep in mind heading into this results roundup.

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With the DAWBench DSP test, we’re using the SGA1566 variant running under Reaper for this generation of testing and we see the 8750H performing around the level of an entry-level desktop i5 chip. In comparison to previous generations, this isn’t overly surprising as historically the mobile i7 CPU of any given generation tends to sit around the level of the leading i5 desktop solution in the performance stakes.

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Running the DAWBench Vi test we see similar results here too, with the chip coming in just behind the i5 8400 once again. It’s a reasonable showing and in reality, we’re probably looking at maybe a 25% gain over the last generation flagship mobile chip.

Given that we’ve seen 3 or 4 generations now where 10% gains year on year has been the standard then normally we’d be pretty happy about seeing a jump of 25% coming out of single refresh and indeed it’s certainly a far better value option than the model it replaced.

However, we saw a jump of 40% on the desktop last year and frankly all we’re doing here is shoehorning in another couple of cores, rather than bringing in a whole new platform. It looks like they’ve played it cautiously by not pushing the chip too much and the temperatures do seem a little on the safe side even under stress testing.

To be fair to them, this is pretty much what the average user wants from a laptop chip, giving us quick bursts to deal with any sudden intensive activity, but otherwise, aggressive power-saving to ensure a long battery life when on the move.

Which of course, is pretty much the opposite of what most of us power users want, as we tend to be looking for a high-performance desktop replacement solution. It’s clear there is a bit of headroom here which will no doubt be leveraged over the next couple of range refreshes, it’s just a little bit frustrating that we can’t extract a bit more of it right now ourselves.

With all that said I suspect that after seeing the CPU war kick expectations up a notch as it did last year, that I may have headed into this with slightly higher expectations than normal this time around.

Overall, the final result here is a solid release with above average generational gains that I’m sure will be more than appreciated by anyone who is in the market for a new model this year.

Roli have a nice little offer available for anybody wishing to jump into world of the funky 5D-touch Seaboard Rise controllers.

Unfortunately Roli hadn’t sorted out their website at the start of the promo so I held back from making a song and dance about it but that situation has now changed and the site is alive and kicking. Any purchases of the Seaboard Rise 25 and 49 between October 23rd and December 24th are eligible for £75 and £150 cashback respectively from Roli. That’s not bad at all to be fair!

For anyone not aware of these controllers they are pretty unique all things considered. the keyboard is made of a pressure-sensitive squishy grey, sensor embedded material that allows you to shape sound through touch – strike the keywaves, press into them, glide sideways along them and slide up and down the keywaves to venture into new sonic territory.

Of course this is no good without an MPE (Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression) compatible synth so Roli have kindly included Equator, their custom-built software synthesizer and sound engine. A perfect companion for these otherwordly keybeds!

I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen videos of somebody going absolutely savage on a grid based controller – finger drumming, launching clips, crazy light shows and all sorts of other audiovisual trickery. I also imagine a lot of people watch on in awe wishing they had just a sliver of the technical prowess required to pull off such feats.

Well, good news everyone (insert Prof. Farnsworth meme here). Novation have devised an interactive website designed to help you hone your skills to become a Launchpad legend and think of ways to implement the Launchpad into your musical and visual creations. Now it’s not just a website where you have to use your mouse or keyboard (although keyboard control is supported), it’s designed to connect to a real Launchpad unit which takes the interaction to a whole new level!

The content will be released in a sequence of steps, the 1st is Launchpad Arcade which gives you access to a load of one-shots and samples from Harry Coade – Found Sound. The next steps will cover everything from rhythm practice, choosing a Launchpad, creating lightshows, building an online presence and getting to know your Launchpad inside out.

Today we have a few more models from the Intel i9 range on the desk in the shape of the 14 core 7940X and the 7960X. I was hopeful that the 18 core would be joining them as well this time around, but currently, another team here have their hands on it so it may prove to be a few weeks more until I get a chance to sit down and test that one.

Now I’m not too disappointed about this as for me and possibly the more regular readers of my musings, the 16 core we have on the desk today already is threatening to be the upper ceiling for effective audio use.

The reason for this is that I’ve yet to knowingly come across a sequencer that can address more than 32 threads effectively for audio handling under ASIO. These chips offer 28 and 32 threads respectively as they are hyper-threaded, so unless something has changed at a software level that I’ve missed (and please contact me if so), then I suspect at this time the 16 core chip may well be well placed to max the current generation of sequencers.

Of course, when I get a moment and access to the larger chip, I’ll give it a proper look over to examine this in more depth, but for the time being on with the show!

Both chips this time around are advising a 165W TDP figure, which is up from the 140W TDP quoted back on the 7920X we looked at a month or two back. The TDP figure itself is supposed to be an estimate of the power usage under regular workloads, rather than peak performance under load. This helps to explain how a 14 core and 16 core chip can both share the same TDP rating, as the 14 core has a higher base clock than the 16 core to compensate. So in this instance, it appears that they have to some degree picked the TDP and worked backward to establish the highest performing, clocks at that given power profile point.

Once the system itself starts to push the turbo, or when you start to overclock the chip the power draw will start to rise quite rapidly. In this instance, I’m working with my normal air cooler of choice for this sort of system in the shape of the BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3 which is rated at 250W TDP. Water-loop coolers or air coolers with more aggressive fan profiles will be able to take this further, but as is always a concern for studio users we have to consider the balancing of noise and performance too.

Much like the 7920X, we looked at previously, the chips are both rated to a 4.2GHz max two core turbo, with staggered clocks running slower on the other cores. I took a shot at running all cores at 4.2GHz but like the 7920X before it we could only hit that on a couple of cores before heat throttling would pull them back again.

Just like the 7920X again however if we pull both of these chips back by 100MHz per core (in this instance both to 4.1GHz) they prove to be stable over hours of stress testing and certainly within the temp limits we like to see here, so with that in mind we’re going to test at this point as it’s certainly achievable as an everyday setting.

As always first up is the CPUid chip info page and benchmarks along with the Geekbench results.

Intel i9 7940X @ 4.1GHz

Intel i9 7960X @ 4.1GHz

Both chips are clocked to the same level and the per-core score here reflects that. The multi-core score, of course, offers a leap from one chip to the other as you’d expect from throwing a few more cores into the equation.

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The DAWBench classic and newer DSP test with Kontakt follow this and once again as there isn’t a whole lot I can add to this.

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The added cores give us improvements across both of these chips as we’ve already seen in the more general purpose tests. The 7960X does appear to offer a slightly better performance curve at the higher buffer rates, which I suspect could be attributed to the increase in the cache but otherwise, it all scales pretty much as we’d expect.

Given the 7940X maintains the roughly £100 per extra core figure (when compared to the 7920X) at current pricing that Intel was aiming for at launch, it does seem to offer a similar sort of value proposition as the smaller i9’s just in this case more is more. The 7960X raises this to roughly £125 per core extra over the 7940X at current pricing, so a bit of cost creep there but certainly not as pricey as we’ve sometimes seen over the years on the higher end chips in the range.

The main concern initially was certainly regarding heat, but it looks like the continued refinement of the silicon since we saw the first i9 batches a few months ago has given them time to get ahead of this and ensure that the chips do well out of the box given adequate cooling.

With the launch of the CoffeeLake’s in the midrange, some of the value of the lower end enthusiast chips appear to have quickly become questionable, but the i9 range above it continues to offer performance levels henceforth unseen by Intel. The’s a lot of performance here, although the price matches it accordingly and we often find ourselves at this time where more midrange level systems are good enough for the majority of users.

However, for the power user with more exhaustive requirements who find that they can still manage to leverage every last drop of power from any system they get their hands on, I’m sure there will plenty here to peak your interest.

Following on from the last post regarding Universal Audio’s epic Q4 promotions we have an offer that is sure to tempt plenty of people into the UAD fold.

If you buy any Apollo rackmount interface you get yourself a free UAD Satellite QUAD or OCTO. Yes, you read that right – buy any Apollo rack unit and turbo charge your DSP processing power with a free Satellite. How good is that?! All you have to do is register the product and fill out the prompted shipping information, Universal Audio will deal with the rest and ship your Satellite in 6-8 weeks.

Universal Audio seem to bring out the big guns when it comes to Q4 promotions. First up is a great deal for any new purchasers of the highly regarded Apollo Twin MkII and USB interfaces with a varying amount of freebies depending which model you opt for:

The promotional plug-ins will be automatically added to your account upon registration of the interface. Also worth noting is that if you already own any of the promotional plug-ins you will be able to pick from a list of alternative plug-ins!

The promotion runs until 31st December and all applicable Universal Audio interfaces can be found here.

The new M-Audio C Series interfaces certainly look the part, I’ve not had chance to get a hands-on with them but if they sound half as good as they look then they make for a great entry-level interface. So recently we got the news that M-Audio have teamed up with venerable plug-in developer Softube to give existing and new users of the C Series interfaces a classy collection of three very different equalizers.

Everybody loves free stuff, but rarely do you get much useful stuff for free in this life! First up in the Passive-Active Pack is the Passive Equalizer, meticulously modeled from an iconic German three-band EQ for a nice and clear, open sound.

Next up is the Active Equalizer, modeled from a distinctive Swiss EQ design and is perfect for surgical cuts and boosts in your mix. Total mix precision.

The final part of the pack is the Focusing Equalizer, an untraditional and inspiring method of EQing and is a concept exclusive to Softube. There is even an additional saturation circuit based on the distortion and compression from their famous FET Compressor.

These will be available through December 31st and all M-Track C Series interfaces can be found here.

Presonus has made quite a name for itself in both the software and hardware worlds of late. Studio One has become a well respected household name as far as DAW’s are concerned and their accompanying hardware isn’t too shabby either with the Quantum audio interface making waves pretty recently and swiftly followed by it’s sibling, the Quantum 2. The FaderPort line has seen some R&D attention over the past year, evolving from the initial FaderPort, a small single channel motorized fader with transport and DAW controls into the FaderPort 8, a completely redesigned 8 channel unit with a plethora of controls…Well, 8 channels obviously weren’t enough and they have just released the FaderPort 16 – a 16 channel behemoth with all the bells and whistles you could want for mixing and engineering.

The FaderPort 16 comes equipped with 16 touch-sensitive, 100mm motorized faders, Scribble Strips, 89 buttons covering 104 different functions that allow you to quickly zoom in on audio files for editing, modify plug-in parameters, manage aux mixes and control track levels with the touch of a finger. The Session Navigator provides easy access to 8 mission critical functions, used in conjunction with the large encoder and companion buttons to mix with much greater efficiency than using just a mouse and keyboard. There is one glaring omission though, where is the metering?

Of course, no Presonus hardware is complete without seriously tight integration with Studio One. You even get a free copy of Studio One 3 Artist with the FaderPort which is a nice addition! It will work with other DAWs on the market too but don’t expect instant plug and play functionality without some configuration steps.

Now the FaderPort 16 doesn’t come cheap. At £899 it is on the more expensive side of the spectrum with regards to MIDI controllers but comparing it to lesser devices wouldn’t be fair as I can’t think of any that have the scope of features this has and personally if I had the spare cash to throw down on a DAW controller I would be seriously considering adding this to the studio.